This invention relates to a method and apparatus for printing labels to be attached to articles of merchandise or produce.
In printing labels that are to be attached to a product, a label printer is used in cooperation with a scale when selling products at a price based on weighed out amounts which may differ from one another, that is, when selling by weight. The label printer is not used in association with a scale, however, when products are sold at a fixed price. With the conventional label printer, stamps bearing the names of the products are prepared in advance for each kind of product, a stamp for one kind of product is changed and replaced by the proper stamp each time the kind of product changes, and information such as unit price relating to the name of a particular product is entered through a manual operation. The conventional label printer therefore is not only complicated to use but also is high in cost owing to the large number of stamps which are necessary, these totaling as high as 200 to 300 in many cases.
Such information as the name of a product as well as its unit price and price when sold by weight is essential when issuing labels to be affixed to the products or when totalizing proceeds In conventional printing of labels for products to be sold by weight, in which use is made of an electronic scale, or even when the products are sold in fixed amounts or at a fixed price without relying upon the electronic scale, the arrangement is such that the stamps bearing the names of the products are removably placed within the printer to effect printing on the labels. This means the number of stamps provided must equal the number of product categories, necessitating numerous stamps when the number of product categories is large. Though characters stating, say, "unit price" are printed out on labels in advance in instances where this is permitted, the numerals indicating the unit price are printed by a numeral printing device incorporated within the printer proper. Thus it is necessary to provide a printing device for product names and a printing device for numerals, resulting in a printer that is structurally complex and correspondingly high in cost.
In order to eliminate the shortcomings encountered in the prior-art apparatus requiring the multiplicity of stamps for printing the product names, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication Nos. 56-119815 and 56-119816 disclose a label printing apparatus which includes an input device, a central processing unit (CPU), a random access memory (RAM), a read-only memory (ROM) and a label printer, wherein characters stored previously in the ROM are combined to form the name of a product in response to an input from the input device. The operator registers in the RAM memory the code numbers of products as well as product name keywords made up of characters constituting the names of the products. By subsequently entering a code number through use of the input device, the name of a product can be called from memory and printed out on a label by means of the label printer. With the above-described apparatus, however, the operator registers the name of a product by entering the product name keyword while observing, say, a table showing the correspondence between characters and the keywords made up of these characters. In order to verify whether the data actually registered is correct or not, the operator must actuate the label printer each time to print out the name of the product (the characters corresponding to the particular keyword) on a label. This is an extremely time-consuming procedure.